Entrepreneurial Popular Delusions & The Molly-Coddling of Crowds

Recently, a simple advertisement for an event (which I sought Mr Wang’s help to advertise) [1] sparked off a reprise of an old post [2] I wrote about months back. In response, Heavenly-Sword wrote about his views in distinction between the entrepreneurial knowledge and entrepreneurial spirit. Based on this distinction, he tried to seperate the impact of governmental control has derailed the entrepreneurial spirit in modern Singapore. Here is my one line summary to the issue, “If I am going to teach entrepreneurship, the conventional education will not work and leads to molly-coddling. So, this is how I am going to teach it…..”

There is a chasm in most Singaporeans’ attitude in entrepreneurship. The chasm is divided by two schools of thought which attempt to answer the question, “Can Entrepreneurship be taught?”. The first attributes that teaching entrepreneurship is an oxymoronic activity (something along the lines that you cannot teach creativity) and entrepreneurs are like artists, only the most talented are borne and survive, while the rest of them are eliminated by natural selection. The second school of thought suggest that we can “social-engineer” entrepreneurs, like what we did with the lawyers, doctors, and now scientists. I define this school of thought as the molly-coddling school. My only assessment to that is that both schools of thought are equally self-deluding. There is really nothing more to add except that most Singaporeans are equally clueless in deciding their own course of action.

Let me start with a recent training weekend where the semi-finalists of a business plan competition attended. The aim of that exercise was not to teach them the basics of fundraising, venture capital, legal and accounting procedures in handling a business. The idea of that training camp is to expose the weakness of the participants’ innovative business ideas. So, to cut the long story short, each and every single participant were passed around very room, where there is either a group of people, who are true-blue entrepreneurs (that includes myself), the venture capitalists or business angels, the industry leaders, the government bureaucrats, the academic staff and the student organizers.

The participants were suddenly given many contradicting views to their business idea. In the end, some of them actually complained to the organizers that they cannot make up their mind on whose suggestions to take. The chief advisor of the event (he’s a venture capitalist by training) simply replied at the end of the event, “That’s the point. In entrepreneurship, you are supposed to be exposed to many ideas and suggestions on whether your business will or will not work in real life.

You can have an open mind to listen to all the options but as an entrepreneur, you need to make a decision in how you should take this forward.” This incident demonstrated a very simple weakness in Singaporean entrepreneurs:

they just cannot assimilate and elucidate the information from both sides of the house and make an independent decision and passionate stand on their ideas. Actually, I can’t blame them for being so indecisive because our education system never allows us to fight for our own stand or opinions. If you want an example, try to remember what your junior college teacher teach you in GP. They always tell you to state both sides of the case but don’t fight passionately on one. Then suddenly you realize that you have been one of those in the crowd who has been molly-coddled throughout your life. Afterall, we all live in a nanny state.

A lot of people do not realized that they are molly-coddled since young. I remember the days where I defied my parents’ wish to study law and engineering. I remember that I was failed in my chinese exam (and I am an A1 grader) because I decide to be creative and write a detective or martial arts story. My idea is always the following: if Galileo can fight against the church for condemning his ideas about inertia, why should I fear about standing in my own position? I rediscovered that position when I went to UK to study. Similarly, it’s all funny when you realized why you have never fought passionately for something. That is because if you stay in a protected environment, you tend to take for granted in everything. You expect the government to feed you, to look after your livelihoods and to make life easy for you. Otherwise, you blame them.

That is one of the delusions when I see my students studying entrepreneurship. They thought that if they follow that track, they would be successful. They did not realize that they were coaxed into the idea of being one and they don’t even know why they want to take it up. When I start selling them the hard life of being an entrepreneur, I start to see many students drop out. This is the real test I set for my students. They failed not because they cannot do the course, but they failed because they gave up at the first instant of hardship.

Now I will state the popular delusions of molly-coddled entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurial Popular Delusions

Here are a few entrepreneurial popular delusions and myths which I see common in Singaporeans:

1. An Entrepreneur’s success is defined by making money: Yes, yes, it’s Asian culture. Believe it or not, it’s also American culture. That benchmark cannot work. What about social entrepreneurs like Mother Theresa and others who found ways to generate revenue to help the poor to create a sustainable environment or Jeremy Leggett who want to replace oil with a better energy alternative? I once told a friend that an entrepreneur is one who makes money through his passion whereas a businessman makes money for the sake of making money. That definition of entrepreneur is wrong as I mature along along the way when I built a company and learned some hard lessons about management and fundraising.

Most people become entrepreneurs for the sake of making money. I have nothing against that. That’s one of my secondary reasons. The real and successful entrepreneurs have a vision and wants to make a difference in life. That comes to my current definition: an entrepreneur is one who either creates a new invention/business idea/product/service that changes the way how market works, or one who redefines the market by carving a market niche where it is not replicable. In return for that success, he contributes back to society not necessarily with money but with other possible resources that could benefit people in kind.